Wednesday, 10 October 2012

First, do no harm: Confronting the myths of psychiatric drugs

AbstractThe enduring psychiatric myth is that particular personal, interpersonal and social problems in living aremanifestations of ‘mental illness’ or ‘mental disease’, which can only be addressed by ‘treatment’ withpsychiatric drugs. Psychiatric drugs are used only to control ‘patient’ behaviour and do not ‘treat’ anyspecific pathology in the sense understood by physical medicine. Evidence that people, diagnosed with‘serious’ forms of ‘mental illness’ can ‘recover’, without psychiatric drugs, has been marginalized by drugfocused research, much of this funded by the pharmaceutical industry. The pervasive myth of psychiatricdrugs dominates much of contemporary ‘mental health’ policy and practice and raises discrete ethical issuesfor nurses who claim to be focused on promoting or enabling the ‘mental health’ of the people in their care.For full paper click here